Valve bans 90,000 Steam accounts

As this SteamDB graph shows, over 28,000 Steam accounts were banned on Wednesday 18 July, followed by over 60,000 on Thursday 19 July. The bulk of the bans were triggered by Valve Anti Cheat (VAC) measures, which suggests that VAC has identified a new exploit or form of cheating.

Valve has not commented on the spike in VAC bans, but the SteamDB graph shows that, in July 2018 alone, over 120,000 VAC bans have been applied to Steam accounts. Which is more or less par for the course – so far, the only month in 2018 which saw fewer than 100,000 VAC bans was June, with over 56,000 bans.

Valve’s attempts to tackle the perennial issue of cheating in multiplayer games, seen in that light, appear to be paying dividends in 2018, thanks to VAC. If you seek further information about VAC, have a look at this Steam forum.

Steve Boxer has been writing about videogames since the early 1990s. His first console was an Atari VCS, and he misspent most of his youth in the 1980s in the arcades. As well as for Green Man Gaming, he can be found writing for The Guardian, Empire, TechRadar and Pocket-Lint. He’s currently having trouble deciding whether his favourite console is his Xbox One X or his Switch, and plays a wide range of games, but especially RPGs (he loves a good JRPG) action-adventure titles, shooters of all descriptions and driving games. Follow him here.